September 2012

September 30, 2012

John Rentoul, in his Independent On Sunday column today, relates a story about Charles Moore's recent interview with Ed Miliband:

That interview did not start well, Moore reveals in the current Spectator. Nervous of technology, Moore tested his new voice recorder by interviewing his daughter before setting off for Primrose Hill to talk to the Leader of the Opposition. He then pressed "play" instead of "record" and heard himself say, "So, Ed, how come you're so much less glamorous than your brother?" And heard his daughter reply, "It's because I am made of Plasticine."

September 28, 2012

After the debates, which start next week, I expect we'll see a revival in Romney stock. The press will not accept a narrative of drift or deadlock, which is no narrative at all. So they'll provide one of reversals and comebacks, whether or not the facts require it. Actually I think Romney will do well, as he's a very practiced debater, and if Obama does relatively poorly, that might make a difference. But not a big one. This race, barring a political black swan, is already done.

There will be plenty to talk about along the way, of course, but we can also start to speculate about 2016 with reasonable confidence that a two-term Democratic presidency will be coming to an end. The Republicans will have a slate of stronger candidates to pick from than they did this time: Rubio, Christie, Ryan, Martinez, and so on. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, a contest is shaping up of similar potency to 2008. Guess who's at the centre of it? The same couple that have been at the centre of Democratic politics for over twenty years.

Up until recently I was confident that Hillary Clinton wouldn't be running for elected office again. She really gave everything she had in 2008. It must have been utterly shattering, mentally and physically, and there seemed to be such an ominous finality in the party's verdict: it took a good look at her and turned her away in favour of a younger candidate. Then, as Secretary of State, she's done a pretty good job of seeming contentedly resigned to the end of her career in frontline politics. She'll be 68 in 2016, just a year younger than Reagan in 1980.

But every time Bill Clinton is asked about 2016, he makes it clear, without saying so, that he for one wants to see her run. And the more you think about it, the more you think - what else is she going to do? There wouldn't be much point in setting up a not-for-profit, because it would inevitably compete with her husband's for funds and attention. Besides, politics - and Bill - is the love of her life. After resting for a year or two after January, she may well be ready to plunge back in. Her poll ratings, and Bill's, are higher than they have ever been, and - crucially - she is respected across the political divide. It may be that in 2016 one of the most partisan and divisive figures in American political history can run and win as the candidate of healing and unification. It might actually be Hillary that delivers on the promise Obama made in 2008.

There's at least one politician who is praying she doesn't see it this way. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, is locked and loaded for 2016 and has every prospect of hitting his target. He's done an excellent job as governor, breaking the partisan deadlock that has stifled the state's politics, and successfully positioning himself as a highly effective centrist able to work with both sides and get things done. He's a very strategic, very wily operator, and he's determined, unlike his father, to translate his local popularity into national power. Barring Hillary's entry, he will lead the Democratic field. But until Hillary shows her hand, he and other contenders will find it difficult to raise funds and secure supporters. And she will be in no hurry to declare either way.

Cuomo is not easily cowed. He may end up running against Hillary. But it won't be easy, politically or psychologically. Cuomo's biggest mentor in politics, his political father (other than his father), is Bill Clinton. It was Clinton who coached him and supported him early in his career, and he loves him for it.

The Republican primaries have become good for gaudy and unpredictable entertainment. But it takes the Democrats to deliver a real family psychodrama.

September 26, 2012

Romney's political director Rich Beeson (everyone on his team is either rich or Rich) had to run the gauntlet of a conference call with reporters yesterday, right after the publication of some appalling numbers for his campaign in Ohio and Florida, two states without which Romney simply cannot win (particularly the first).

“If we lose Ohio, can we still win?” Beeson said, repeating the question asked of him by reporters. “I say if its and buts were candy and nuts everyday would be Christmas.… I just don’t deal in if-then statements.”

Beeson compared states on the map to children (he has two boys,) saying individual states can’t be written off.

“It’s like kids out there — you’re not ever going to say I’m going to lose one of my kids,” Beeson said. He added, “So we don’t sit down, I don’t sit down and sort of lop those off. I prefer to look at the map holistically.”

September 25, 2012

On Tuesday Bill Clinton hosted both presidential candidates at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. It's testament to Clinton's extraordinary cross-party appeal these days that he's able to pull this kind of thing off just a couple of weeks after giving a deeply political speech at the Democrat convention.

Now, I dare you not to warm to Mitt Romney just a little for a) Turning up, and b) Making a sweet and slightly sad joke about Clinton's speech (from which he's not really recovered).

This week the New Yorker runs a profile of Mitt Romney by Nicholas Lemann. It's behind a paywall for now but here's an extract quoted by Politico:

Romney’s voice lacks resonance and range. … [E]ven in brief appearances, he tends to offer up three- and five-point policy plans that bore the audience. He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one. Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company—Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s—it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero. And Romney’s political references (the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, the organized-labor cause known as ‘card check,’ Obama’s failure to negotiate new free-trade agreements) don’t register much with the people who turn up at rallies. He sounds like someone speaking at a Rotary Club luncheon in the nineteen-fifties.

This description, with its pinpointing of Romney's inability to connect with audiences at a cultural or emotional level, rings true, and I was reminded of it when reading the latest David Brooks column, another of his elegant laments for the decline of the broad-church Republican Party he joined.

Brooks describes how the party used to represent a fusion of anti-government free marketeers and more traditional, socially conscious conservatives, but is now dominated by one faction alone:

Traditional conservatism has gone into eclipse. These days, speakers at Republican gatherings almost always use the language of market conservatism — getting government off our backs, enhancing economic freedom. Even Mitt Romney, who subscribes to a faith that knows a lot about social capital, relies exclusively on the language of market conservatism.

It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists...The results have been unfortunate. Since they no longer speak in the language of social order, Republicans have very little to offer the less educated half of this country. Republicans have very little to say to Hispanic voters, who often come from cultures that place high value on communal solidarity.

Republicans repeat formulas — government support equals dependency — that make sense according to free-market ideology, but oversimplify the real world. Republicans like Romney often rely on an economic language that seems corporate and alien to people who do not define themselves in economic terms. No wonder Romney has trouble relating.

Brooks is very good at compression; at expressing complex philosophies simply and economically. This is a pretty good primer on the beliefs of Burkean conservatives:

They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage...This kind of conservative cherishes custom, believing that the individual is foolish but the species is wise. It is usually best to be guided by precedent...This conservative believes in prudence on the grounds that society is complicated and it’s generally best to reform it steadily but cautiously.

In the Brooks vision of the ideal Republican Party, these kinder, gentler conservatives are allied to free-market firebrands, thus embodying the lovely aphorism of the child psychologist John Bowlby (which I hadn't heard before): "life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base".

Brooks doesn't mention him, but there is only one senior figure in today's GOP who stands for this rounded conservative philosophy. His name is Bush.

September 23, 2012

Chris Stephen of The Observer has a terrific report on the heartening anti-militia protests that swept through Benghazi last week. I advise you to read the whole thing but I couldn't resist extracting this paragraph:

A well-built man, Ehad El Farsi, stopped me to ask if I was American and to apologise on behalf of Benghazi for the killing of Stevens. Told I was English, he explained he was a politics professor at Benghazi university and wanted to talk to me some time about the merits of singer Chris Rea. "What you have here is the people taking action," he said. "All the people."

September 22, 2012

This ad, from 1972, is an attack on the Democratic presidential candidate of that year, George McGovern. It was made by a group calling themselves "Democrats For Nixon" (I wonder if they have reunions from time to time). It just goes to show that there is something about that number, and that argument:

September 21, 2012

Nancy Pelosi helps John Boehner feel like a man again, at a ceremonial driving of nails into the stage for the 2013 inauguration, outside of the Capitol on Thursday. (Luke Sharrett/NYT)

I don't like making predictions because what's the point really when you can just look at Nate Silver's model or check InTrade. Or, you know, wait until election night.

But after the last week or so I feel able to heroically overcome my aversion to prognostication and say this: the man taking the oath from Chief Justice John Roberts on that stage in January will be the same man who did so last time (let's hope they don't screw this one up). Mitt Romney is a dead parrot.

Romney's last chance to overturn Obama's small lead was during the conventions. But Obama came out with an increased lead (from about 1.5 to about 3%) and Romney has endured a terrible last couple of weeks. As the statistician Harry Enten explains, "There hasn't been a single candidate to come back after trailing by 3 points this late in the campaign in the past 60 years."

Furthermore, the latest polls are showing Obama with even bigger leads in the swing states, including Ohio and Florida. We also know that Obama's on-the-ground operation is far superior to Romney's, that he has at least as much money left to spend, and that for all the Democrats' concerns about the tsunami of outside cash being spent by rich Romney supporters, it turns out that most billionaire donors are too stupid for their money to make any difference.

Until recently, I've said what everyone else has been saying: Obama's biggest vulnerability is the slow economy, and it might still be his downfall. But now I think it's too late for Romney to take advantage there. He's had his shot. The weak economy is already baked into the current polls. I agree with Marc Ambinder, who thinks that "voters have already conducted their referendum on the Obama economy, and made their conclusions...If they are persuadable, they are persuadable on other issues, issues that Romney isn't going to find much traction with."

People will talk a lot about the debates being Romney's last chance to turn things around. It's true that Romney will probably be very good, because he's a highly capable debater who got a lot of practice in over the last year. But Obama is too solid a performer to quail, and anyway debates, though fun to obsess over if you're that way inclined, never really change anything.

Obama must be a hugely frustrating candidate to run against. He's so steady, so consistent, so dull, and so hard to knock off-balance. He also manages to sound nice and reasonable while heading an absolutely ruthlessoperation that exceeds even the 2004 Bush campaign under Karl Rove in its remorseless focus on winning. Romney is flailing around now, inventing new strategies on the run and throwing tactics at the wall in the hope that something, anything will stick. In other words, he is into John McCain territory.

Sarah Silverman's politically incorrect get-out-the-vote video of 2008 was one of the highlights of the unofficial campaign. Now she's back with another spot, this one focused on new voter registration rules which, she tells voters from minority groups, are designed to "fuck you in the ass". I'd like to see Mitt Romney start talking like this.

September 19, 2012

Romney's Randian callousness also goes against the core American grain. Americans do not see themselves as victims, but as potential winners, even in rough times. Romney's contempt for the 47 percent violates a central tenet of the American dream: anyone can make it. Romney is saying that half the country can't make it, don't even want to make it, and are parasites on the rest. Asking for their vote would be like asking children to give up their toys. Why would they?

Now I certainly believe, as I explained yesterday, that this story is bad for Romney. But I think Sullivan overplays the importance of it here. My point is this: many of the 47% may actually agree with Romney's comment (even if, in the end, they don't think it's worthy of a president). Few people will think for a moment that he might be talking about them.

Most voters won't take time to consider the detail of Romney's comments, though the Obama campaign is doing a good job of prompting them to do so (see above). Many of those who aren't paying much attention will simply take this out: Romney's been saying there are "makers and takers"; producers and parasites.

And many of those people will agree with him - even if they're on benefits.

The idea that the nation is being dragged down by a minority of deadbeats and scroungers is a perennially popular one, in the US as it is here (and in Italy, Spain...). The logic of it is resistant to facts or economic reality or self-awareness. Crucially, the "takers" are always other people.

Having said that, it's a message with limited appeal, ultimately. Voters generally want their leaders to leaders of the whole nation, rather than a favoured part of it. So I wouldn't advise Romney to continue on this theme. But I just think it's not quite as unpopular a message, in itself, as we'd like to believe it is.

September 18, 2012

In case you have somehow managed to remain unaware, a grand piano has just come crashing down on Mitt Romney's head. It has messed up his hair, and then some.

The left-wing journal Mother Jones has turned up a secretly-made video of Romney talking to a room full of rich donors, at an unspecified date some time after the primaries ended. You can watch the various clips they've posted here. It shows Mitt talking openly and freely about the election, perhaps in response to questions from the floor. He sounds animated, at ease with the people he knows support him, but also rather keen to impress. And that has led him into trouble.

The stand-out gaffe is this:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

As the excellent conservative commentator David Brooks points out, it's one thing to consider the steep rise in the proportion of America's population claiming benefits over the last thirty years to be a problem. It's another to write off everyone receiving benefits as hapless, hopeless, self-pitying layabouts:

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.

It should also be pointed out that when you include payroll and sales taxes and so on, most of these people pay far higher rates of tax than Romney.

I need hardly spend any more time on Romney's crassness. Let's ask instead what impact it will have on his chances of becoming president.

The first thing to say is that it probably won't have a huge impact. Individual gaffes rarely do. They usually feel bigger and more important in the moment than they actually turn out to be. Obama's patronising remarks about Pennsylvanians - also caught on tape during a donors' dinner - seemed to pose a real danger of killing his campaign. But he survived the Pennsylvania primary and managed to put it behind him.

But Obama's gaffe was made in April, not half-way through September. Romney has much less time to recover. Even if he does shake off this story, he will have spent the next several days fire-fighting stories about it. This is a crucial point. The closer you get to an election, the harder those numbers are to shift. If you're two or three points behind, as Romney is, every day that you're not closing the gap is a day that hurts you more than your opponent - even if the gap remains the same. Every day the stories dominating the news aren't hurting your opponent is a bad one.

These are bad days for Romney, then. Very bad, actually, because around now a lot of independent voters, not terribly interested in politics, are starting to turn their weary eyes to the election. Romney's remarks will play right into a narrative about the Republican candidate that the Obama campaign will hope has been cooking away at the backs of their minds for the last few months: that he is, essentially, Mr Burns from The Simpsons, a rich man who hates everyone except other rich men.

But perhaps even worse than that is what these videos do to Mitt's stature. I don't mean that viewing a tiny image of his head through a wine glass makes him look physically minute. I mean that he comes across, on this tape, as a small undignified character, panting with eagerness to impress, something more like a two-bit political pundit being shoved a few grand to speak after dinner than a president-in-waiting.

If Romney loses in November, Republicans will bemoan his tendency to make gaffes. But that would be to massively miss the point. The point is, they need better candidates. A man who writes off nearly half of the nation as deadbeats is not fit to be running for president of the United States. And he was the best of the bunch.

September 16, 2012

But, accustomed to academic triumph, Wallace expected his literary ascent to be meteoric. When it didn’t come — a lukewarm review from the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani left him hiding in his room and crying for days — it quickly turned him sour. Then, in 1991, he met the poet Mary Karr at a rehab meeting, and his behaviour reached its most frightening apogee. Karr was married, and Wallace became obsessed with her. At a party, he appeared with a bandage over his left shoulder and coyly refused to reveal what it was hiding: a tattoo of Karr’s name across a heart. When he later got married to the artist Karen Green, Wallace “edited” the tattoo by putting a strikethrough and an asterisk across Karr’s name and having Green’s name tattooed as a footnote at the bottom of his arm.

September 11, 2012

This, of course, was the phrase that James Carville wrote down and hung up in the Clinton campaign's war room in 1992. It has been repeated ad nauseam by pundits and analysts at every election since.

It contains much wisdom, pithily expressed. The hardest thing for candidates and campaigns to do is focus. They feel as if they ought to have positions on everything, and fill up their airtime with new soundbites and policies. But most voters don't have time for politics, so most of this activity is wasted. Only a relentless focus on what matters cuts through. And what matters, especially in a recession, is how well-off voters feel or expect to feel.

It is becoming evident that the Romney campaign has both under and over-learned this lesson.

They have focused on the economy to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Surprisingly - remarkably - Romney's convention speech contained almost no mention of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Without quite realising it, the Republicans have ceded their home turf of national security to the Democrats in this election. That is an historic shift.

Paul Ryan's appointment to VP seemed to presage a campaign about social welfare and the future of government. But so far, despite the Democrats efforts, that hasn't happened, because it turns out that Romney hasn't got much to say about that. He wants to talk about the economy.

The weirdest thing is this: he doesn't have anything to say about it. He has no detailed policy plan. He has no real vision of the American future. His sole pitch seems to be: leave it to me, I'm a businessman.

That's not enough.

What Romney and has team have failed to understand is that he isn't running for CEO of America, he's running for president. He can't rely on his business resume, and he needs to stand for something more than economic competence.

Romney has drawn the wrong lesson from 1992. Bill Clinton needed to focus on the economy because, frankly, he had most of the other stuff covered. People knew or assumed he would be good at education or welfare policy. They also saw a candidate who couldn't help but be a fully-fledged, rounded, foibles-and-all character. So after telling them his story, Clinton told them about his economic plan, in lucid detail.

It worked.

By focusing only on the economy and then only at the most superficial of levels, Romney has denuded himself of a full political identity, and cut away some of the traditional supports of a Republican candidate's platform.